Teddy Bears (novel)
Teddy Bears is the upcoming debut novel by American writer Matthew Little. Set in 2014, Teddy Bears is told from the point of view of a young man named Mark Lopes; the novel is presented as Mark's autobiographical confessional in which he discusses falling in love with a man named Gerry who leads him into legal trouble in an attempt to escape their deplorable living situations in order to be together. Little considers the novel to be a romantic crime-drama that takes certain elements from his own life. He first came up with the story in March 2014 and after several false starts he finally began to write the novel seriously in October of 2017. Synopsis In October 2014, Mark Lopes is living in a gross, unkempt apartment with his alcoholic father in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. One night he gets away and hangs out with a few friends and by chance he meets a man named Gerry, whom Mark is immediately infatuated with. The two strike up a quick romance and bond over the fact that they both come from unhappy places, as Gerry lives in a "shack" with his sister and her boyfriend, both drug addicts. Gerry pays for a hotel where he and Mark spend two days and nights together away from all their problems, but more problems arise out of nowhere when Gerry decides to take it upon himself to rob a gas station in an attempt to gain some money so they won't have to return to the grungy lives they were originally living. Inspirations The idea for the novel came to Little in March 2014 while he was living with his then-boyfriend in Connecticut. He had always wanted to write a story featuring a gay protagonist, but never had any fully solid ideas on a singular story that could be interesting enough to entertain possible readers. At the time of its inception, Little believed that all or most LGBT-related novels followed the same formula. On March 4, 2014, possibly the day he thought up the novel, he posted on Facebook: :"I’m sick of the same generic story told over and over again. Gay guy, usually skinny with model-boyish looks, deals with his sexuality in one way or another, which could be coming out to himself, his parents, evading homophobic people, while in high school, finding his first true love, prom scene, etc., etc., etc…. ... It seems like every story pertaining to gay men (and other people on the LGBT line) is the same thing just wrapped differently, and it’s almost always set in the same timezone, set during developing years, in their teen or newly adult years. I want there to be something different, something set after puberty, about someone who’s already loved and lost, who isn’t a shy closeted soul, who isn’t sparkling with good looks and who has a belly packing under their shirt. A story that takes a wrong turn, with suspense, hard images…"https://www.facebook.com/matthew.little.writer/posts/255217921325981 He credits the Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers as an early influence on Teddy Bears, in how the film follows a group of college girls who you wouldn't think could do bad things as they gleefully partake in acts of debauchery. Little thought that he would love to see something like that but with a gay lead or leads. In his head he originally saw the novel as having a similar devil-may-care attitude involving the crime aspects, but ended up toning it down when he wrote the version that was meant for publication. Another early influence was the 2003 film Monster, which chronicles the part of Aileen Wournos' life where she was both living with her girlfriend and murdering multiple men for their money and just out of rage. To Little, Monster is the best example of a story with LGBT aspects that involves unfiltered crime, and he wanted to capture something very similar to that, albeit not as violent, but still something realistic. Little mentioned that when he was coming up with a story to write he had asked his then-boyfriend how a novel where two boyfriends go on a killing spree sounded; his boyfriend thought it wasn't a very good idea, so Little decided to instead write about two boyfriends who participate in a lesser, though still very serious, crime. Autobiographical elements As with a large majority of Little's work, Teddy Bears contains many elements and moments that come directly from Little's own life that make up a huge part of the book. For example, the apartment Mark and his father live in is based on the apartment Little had lived in with his mother, step-father, and grandmother in Fairhaven, Massachusetts between February and October 2013, and the street its on is even included. At the time, his mother and step-father were raging alcoholics and his grandmother suffered depression as a result of their drama, and Little suffered daily stress not knowing if the day was going to be good or bad, and he would regularly check on his mother sometimes just to see if she was breathing. Mark is based on Little himself, and Gerry is partially based on his ex-boyfriend and his current boyfriend, while Mark and Gerry's relationship is based on the one he had once shared with his ex, as that particular romance happened during a very formative time in Little's life and he wanted the novel to be something of an ode to it. The whole plot point of Mark and Gerry going on a crime spree in order to fund their time together comes from how when Little was still living under his mother's alcoholism, he had wanted to escape so badly he had wondered what lengths he would go to achieve that. It plays out almost like an alternative history narrative, or rather a "what if" scenario: "What if the man of my dreams had come to save me? But what if it came at a risk of getting in deep trouble? And what if I was okay with taking that risk?" Writing Although Little came up with the overall story in March, he wouldn't begin writing it until the summer of 2014, shortly after moving back to Massachusetts. In the original unfinished draft Little wrote Mark's narration as being overly sarcastic, which made it seem like Mark didn't take what was happening around him seriously, thus having him sound childish even though he was supposed to be 23 years old. This mirrors Little's psyche at the time; in the novel as it is currently being written, Little paints Mark as being a person who is fed up, and is always on edge and even angry at the fact that he has to deal with what he deals with, which is how Little feels when it comes to what he has had to put up with in the past now that he is older. Also in the original draft, Little also made Mark in a tongue-in-cheek way constantly say things that reminded the reader that they are in fact reading a book, and even though in the final version Mark still does that, he does it in a lesser degree. The first draft was never finished, and after reading what he had wrote he decided to discard it. He had let the project sit for a while and worked instead on his poetry and other novel ventures. Teddy Bears, however, would always come back to him, and he tried writing it a few more times before giving it up like the first time. Although he wished for it to be his first novel, in the summer of 2015 he began working on another novel, titled Boss, that he thought would be his break through. Both stories shared a similar plot about a young man falling for someone they shouldn't be with in the first place, although Boss was based on an affair he'd had with a married man, but still carried most of the thematic material he wanted for Teddy Bears. Boss was never completed, and Little went back to Teddy Bears a few more times before finally gaining a surge of creativity that allowed him to finally push for the version of Teddy Bears he wanted. One of the things that helped Little write Teddy Bears was the 2015 film Carol. Little felt like that film, and also the novel it's based on, almost fully captured the essence that Little had so badly craved to capture himself. Little said that Carol "is my favorite movie and is one of my favorite books, and I feel like if I was alive around when Patricia Highsmith wrote it, I would have tried writing something like it first"; he loved the whole idea of having two people wanting to be together in solidarity and take their obvious attraction on the road in order to escape the humdrum of their supposed lives. While writing Teddy Bears between October 2017 and when it was finished, Little would sometimes play the movie in the background just so he could get into that atmosphere. He stated that he played the movie "at least fifty or more times" on either his own DVD copy or Netflix. Style Teddy Bears is presented as Mark's open confessional about what he and Gerry got themselves into. Little frames the novel to depict Mark writing the story exactly as he would say it aloud, mixing free thought and a stream of consciousness as he relays to the reader about an incident that had happened to him a few years before. References Category:Debut novels Category:American LGBT novels Category:American autobiographical novels Category:Novels set in Massachusetts